Cultris II is the sequel to Cultris. It is a PC based online multiplayer tetromino game, similar to Tetris, available as a free download. It is known for its Timer-based combo system, which makes it an extremely fast-paced game. You can play games over the internet as well as several singleplayer modes. Cultris II uses LWJGL, BASS, Allatori and Excelsior JET. The music and sounds in the game were composed by Tomi Korkalainen, Lukas Nystrand, Stephan Raab (1998), Mark Wallowy, Eivor Lilja, Esa Ruoho, Kai Fischer, Konsta Mikkonen, Christian Antkow and others.

Features

General

Customizable control keys

Customizable DAS and ARR

Customizable Tetromino colors and spawn orientations

Windowed mode or fullscreen

Single-player

Playing against bots

Single-player challenges

Challenges are arranged in a pyramid shape. There are 32 challenges in total, 16 of them are Tier 1 (located in the bottom line). To play a Tier 2+ challenge, you first have to beat the 2 associated challenges below.

Don't make Keanu sad. Always stay above 80 BPM. (you just have 5 seconds in which you can stay below 80 BPM)

Hello Cleveland

1

beat opponent

Something's fishy with the directions here. (move and rotate directions are swapped every second piece)

Om Nom Nom Nom

none

20 lines

Clear 20 lines. (1 filled square disappears for every placed piece)

Angular momentum

2

beat opponents

You spin me right round, baby right round like a record, baby right round right round. (field is vertically mirrored after every placed piece)

Lying

none

120 seconds

At the end of the challenge there will be a green piece. Dear [subject name here] try to play for two minutes. (A deadly piece sequence consisting only of S and Z pieces)

Travolta Fever

none

90 seconds

Stay alive for 90 seconds. (increased gravity, roughly 1 second to the very bottom)

Tier 3 Challenges

Quickstart

1

30 seconds

beat opponent

Beat your opponent in less than 30 seconds. (opponent plays at 100 BPM, but doesn't send any lines)

Hungry

none

25 seconds

reach the bottom

You have only 25 seconds to eat all the cheese. (complete a cheese game fast enough)

Melee

65

beat opponents

Too many cooks spoil the broth. Can you take on all those cooks? (opponents play at 60 BPM, warning: may be laggy!)

Empty House

none

perfect clear

Clear the playfield completely.

Tier 4 Challenges

Shi Tai Ye

none

clear 10 lines

Who wants to be <<The Great Grand Master>>? (placed pieces disappear, ghost piece still visible)

Maserati

none

60 seconds

40 lines

Clear 40 lines. (in under a minute)

Tier 5 Challenges

Grande Finale

none

100 lines

Clear 100 lines. (receive 4 garbage lines every 10 seconds)

Tier 6 Challenges

Uber l33t

none

send 250 lines

Send 250 lines. (receive 4 garbage lines every 6.5 seconds)

Multiplayer

Online

Free for all

Team play

Cheese

Offline

split screen

Mechanics

Garbage

Be it Standard multiplayer or Swisse cheese, garbage in Cultris II has always exactly one hole per row. The position of the hole is completely random. This means there's a 10 % chance that two consecutive lines have the hole in the same column, and a 1 % chance that three consecutive lines have the hole in the same column. However, all players receive exactly the same garbage (the sequence of hole positions is fixed for a round).

There are two ways to send garbage lines to other players:

clearing more than one line with a single piece placement (multi-line clears):

Double: worth 1 garbage line

Triple: worth 2 garbage lines

Tetris: worth 3 garbage lines

Combos

All lines sent during a combo (multi-line clears included) are evenly distributed among all opponents. If opponent #1 receives 10 garbage lines from a combo, then opponent #2 will receive 9, 10 or 11 lines from the same combo.

Incoming (pending) lines can be blocked (countered) before they enter the playfield. There's roughly a 1.5 seconds delay before the first pending line is inserted. Afterwards, one pending line is inserted every 0.5 seconds. During this period, every line that is normally sent to an opponent will be used to delete 1 pending line.

Combos

Cultris II uses a time based combo system. A combo ends when the player runs out of combo-time - and not when failing to clear a line (with a piece placement). However, failing to clear a line is penalized with an additional 0.4 seconds time loss. Time is earned by expanding the combo-counter (clearing a line before running out of combo-time). The amount of additional time depends on the current combo-counter and on the amount of lines cleared with the last piece. More explicitly, additional time per Line clear is Base(counter) + NumberOfClearedLines * Bonus(counter) with the numbers found in the table below. The additional time per line clear gets considerably smaller the higher the combo-counter gets - it will even become negative for big combo-counters. This means a player will eventually lose combo-time - even when clearing lines incredibly fast. A 14 combo seems to be the limit for human players.

The combo-counter determines how many lines are sent to the opponents in addition to the normal amount (multi-line clears). The higher the combo-counter, the more lines are sent per line clear. In contrast to multi-line clears, combos get more powerful the longer a round goes (this ensures the end of a round - no hurry up garbage). However, this doesn't happen within the first minute of a round.

initial garbage lines per combo

counter

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

lines sent

0

1

1

1

2

2

3

5

7

9

11

11

11

11

total sent

0

1

2

3

5

7

10

15

22

31

42

53

64

75

total/counter

0.00

0.50

0.67

0.75

1.00

1.17

1.43

1.88

2.44

3.10

3.82

4.42

4.92

5.36

combo-time expansion

base time

2.4

1.1

0.4

0.05

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

bonus time

1.2

0.6

0.3

0.2

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Total/counter tells the effective strength of a combo, provided no multi-line clears are used. A 9 combo is more than double as efficient as a 6 combo, in other words one 9 combo will beat three 6 combos. After roughly a minute, everything above a combo-counter of 5 will send (at least) one additional line. 70 seconds in the game, a 6 combo will send 9 lines in total (0+1+1+1+3+3), whereas a 4 combo will still send only 3 lines. In a very long round even 1 combos will send a line.

Combo-time example:
If you start a combo with a Single (counter=1), then you begin with 2.4 + 1 * 1.2 = 3.6 seconds combo-time.
If you start a combo with a Tetris (counter=1), then you begin with 2.4 + 4 * 1.2 = 7.2 seconds combo-time.
If this is followed up by a Single (counter=2), then you gain 1.1 + 1 * 0.6 = 1.7 seconds additional combo-time.
If this is followed up by a Tetris (counter=2), then you gain 1.1 + 4 * 0.6 = 3.5 seconds additional combo-time.
If you start with a Single followed by a Tetris, then you are rewarded with 3.6 + 3.5 = 7.1 seconds combo-time.
If you start with a Tetris followed by a Single, then you are rewarded with 7.2 + 1.7 = 8.9 seconds combo-time.
In both examples 5 lines were cleared, but the rewarded time is different.
Try to start a combo with a multi-line clear, but avoid them in the later course of a combo.

Rotation System

Cultris II's has its own rotation system, similar to SRS. The differences are:

Wall Kicks

Cultris II's wall kick system is simple, but powerful. The kick directions (and order) doesn't depend on the piece kind nor on the current orientation nor on the rotation direction. Whenever a rotated piece collides with the current stack, these fallback positions are checked (in the given order): left, right, down, left & down, right & down, 2 x left, 2 x right. Adopting the notation from SRS Wall Kicks we have the following kick table:

I, O, J, L, S, T, Z Tetromino Wall Kick Data

Test 1

Test 2

Test 3

Test 4

Test 5

Test 6

Test 7

Test 8

any rotation

( 0, 0)

(-1, 0)

(+1, 0)

( 0,-1)

(-1,-1)

(+1,-1)

(-2, 0)

(+2, 0)

Note, that a piece is never kicked up, or 2 rows down. It is not possible to clear 3 lines at once with an S, Z or T piece as it is in SRS. On the other hand, Cultris II checks the 1 x down kick. This allows a bunch of kicks which can't be done in SRS.

L piece, left & down kick

J piece, down kick

T piece, down kick

S piece, down kick

I piece, down kick

Sometimes, 2 successive kicks are needed to get a piece in the desired location.

J piece, right & down kick followed by down kick

Kicks also work with 180° rotations.

J piece, down kick

T piece, down kick

S piece, down kick

I piece, down kick

Randomizer

All players receive the same piece sequence. A sequence never starts with an S or Z piece. Apart from this, the pieces are generated at random (at least in theory). It's possible to get 5 S pieces in a row ("flood"). It's also possible that the player has to wait 100 pieces until the next I piece finally shows up ("drought"). However, these 2 scenarios are very rare, since the Cultris II Randomizer reduces the chances of getting one of the most recent piece shapes. The chance that the next piece will be of the same kind as the current one just lies at around 3 %.

If the current piece is an S piece, how big are the chances that the next (1 on x-axis), the next but one (2 on x-axis) etc. piece is also an S piece?

If the current piece is an I piece, how long do you have to wait until the next I piece shows up? The last bar shows the chances for having to wait at least 29 pieces.